Give it up to God: The key to victorious living can be working less, surrendering more.

Bear with me, friends. At the risk of being repetitious, I return to a theme I’ve visited before.

I want to talk about a counterintuitive spiritual truth: Namely, that we tend to accomplish greater good and grow closer to God as we try less and less to do those very things.

Call this the power of surrender.

Spiritual growth often results not from working harder, undertaking more self-improvement projects or acting more pious, but from surrendering to a cosmos that’s undeniably beyond our control. This principle is foundational to the New Testament and, as I understand Buddhism, lies at heart of that practice as well.

To receive, we must let go. And let go. And let go some more.

We surrender our good works. We surrender our ambitions. We surrender our fears. We surrender our desire to be praised by others. We surrender our successes and failures alike. We surrender pretty much everything.

As Jesus and St. Paul said, we learn daily to take up our crosses and die.

We recognize that, in the grand scheme, we’re each tiny bits of flotsam bobbing on an infinite sea we can’t begin to fathom. Instead of thrashing desperately about, we let that cosmic sea carry us where it will. We go along peaceably for the ride.

We opt for faith, for trust. We’re not surrendering to nihilism, not resigning ourselves to some hopeless assumption that nothing matters.

Instead, we’re surrendering to hope itself—to a belief that everything does matter, but that we’re not capable of understanding much of it or controlling any of it, so we might as well leave our fates to a merciful God and his plans.

If all this seems abstract, it’s not. It has real implications for our well-being.

Last week, I wrote about the transitory nature of existence, specifically about grieving both the loss of my mother and the departure of my son and his family from our church.

The universe answered that piece with a couple more blows right after I wrote it. A friend of 35 years was diagnosed with cancer and is facing grueling medical procedures and an uncertain future. Then, like a one-two combination from some unhinged heavyweight, another dear friend died suddenly and tragically. I delivered his eulogy last Saturday.

As my dad would have said, I felt lower than a snake’s belly in a wagon rut.

I longed to do something to change things, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t change any of it a whit. I couldn’t create some innovative church program that would heal my buddy’s cancer. I couldn’t conjure up a nuclear-powered prayer that would resurrect my other buddy from his casket.

And so I decided to leave these tragedies, and myself, in God’s hands. I threw up my own hands in surrender. Immediately, I felt my peace of mind returning.

Of course, there are things we can do to help ourselves and others, and those things we should do. I’m not suggesting we all flop on the sofa to eat bonbons and watch soap operas all day every day.

Yes, pray. Yes, go to work Monday through Friday. Yes, educate your children. Yes, volunteer at a soup kitchen. Yes, vote. Yes, always, do what you reasonably can.

But never think you can fix this world in any lasting way. It’s not going to be fixed. In this world we all will experience tribulation no matter what we do.

So what’s the answer?

Quit trying to escape the troubles. Quit obsessively rubbing rabbits’ feet. Quit thinking up new, useless programs for yourself in an effort to stave off the inevitable.

Instead, give up. Surrender. Recognize that no matter how much you do it will never be enough. Resign yourself to that, accept it..

Say in your heart, “I will take what comes, no matter what that is, because in the end I’m powerless to stop it. I turn my journey over to God, because God’s the only hope I have.”

St. Paul talked about this quite a bit.

He encourages us to be transformed by renewing our minds. Where this renewal starts, he says, is with our voluntarily coming to the Lord’s altar and presenting ourselves as “living sacrifices.” We’re to give up and die, in a manner of speaking—and see what God does then, after we’ve ceased striving and grasping and plotting and working.

In another passage he talks about the miraculous ways God has used him as an apostle.

“By the grace of God I am what I am,” he writes. “But that grace did not prove vain in me, for I worked harder than any of them. Yet not I, but God’s grace through me.”

There again is that paradox of surrender, of resignation, of daily dying. We cease from our works. We give up, knowing we can’t change a thing. We collapse as if dead.

But when we give up, God takes over. God’s power is infinitely greater than ours.

God energizes us. God empowers us afresh. We find a strength beyond our own. We may end up accomplishing more good by accident than we used to accomplish on purpose.

Paul Prather is pastor of Bethesda Church near Mount Sterling. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.